Western Europe

Thrust into the unlikely role of professional "literary walking tour" guide, an expat writer provides the most irresistibly witty and revealing tour of Paris in years....

Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? Or have we tarmacked, farmed and built ourselves out of wildness? In his...

This is the bella figura, the Italian concept of making every aspect of life as beautiful as it can be, that Kamin Mohammadi discovered when she escaped the London corporate media world for a year in Italy....

After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting....

The enchanted island of Corfu was home to Gerald Durrell and his family for five years before the Second World War....

In Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured, the superb novelist and memoirist Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan for our time - a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage, and self-confidence....

The Rise of Germany is a masterful history of the war on land, in the air, and at sea, destined to generate significant scholarly debate and listener interest....

Disraeli once declared that "assassination never changed anything", and yet the idea that World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust might have been averted with a single bullet or bomb has remained a tantalizing one for half a century....

The story of the Roman Republic is the greatest epic in human history. Seen in the long perspective of time, it seems too fantastic to be real....

The story of Napoleon has been written many times. In some versions, he is a military genius, in others a war-obsessed tyrant. Historian Adam Zamoyski cuts through the mythology and explains Napoleon against the background of the European Enlightenment and what he was seeking to achieve....

Set aside your preconceptions of postcard scenery, chocolate and cheese, faceless bankers, and spotless cities. The real Switzerland is anything but bland. This small, multilingual, and fiercely independent country at the heart of Europe is full of surprises....

The appearance, more than 60 years after the Spanish Civil War ended, of mass graves containing victims of Francisco Franco's death squads finally broke what Spaniards call "the pact of forgetting" - the unwritten understanding that their recent, painful past was best left unexplored....

Greek to Me is a charming account of Norris’s lifelong love affair with words and her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, and more....

The Bayeux Tapestry is the world's most famous textile: an exquisite 230-foot-long embroidered panorama depicting the events surrounding the Norman Conquest of 1066....

HGTV meets Downton Abbey! A ready-for-TV story—with charm and humor in abundance—about a Los Angeles producer who moves to England to save his ancestral castle from ruin....

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia....

In December 1943, with the rising realization that the Allies are planning to invade Fortress Europe, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is assigned the title of General Inspector for the Atlantic Wall. His mission is to assess their readiness....

Ten years after the walk across Central Asia and Afghanistan that he memorialized in The Places in Between, Rory Stewart set out on a new journey, traversing a thousand miles....

From the best-selling and award-winning author of Paris 1919 comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a fascinating portrait of Europe from 1900 up to the outbreak of World War I....

An indispensable, richly informative, and always entertaining audio sourcebook on Provence by the writer who has made the region his own....